Richard Linklater (USA)

A Scanner Darkly

To round out your PuSh Festival experience, we offer a selection of films inspired by, and intended to be paired with, performances and artists in the 2019 PuSh program. Here, in our partnership with VIFF, the darkened cinema matches the darkened theatre in illuminating and surprising ways.

Composer Graham Reynolds has worked with director Richard Linklater on four feature films, including Before Midnight, Bernie and Last Flag Flying. But their first collaboration was on this weirdly funny, inescapably prophetic Rotoscope-animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel about alternate realities, drugs, paranoia and the surveillance state. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr. and Winona Ryder can still be detected underneath the movie’s digitally scrambled rendering of suburban stoner simulacra.

The brilliance of A Scanner Darkly is how it suggests, without bombast or fanfare, the ways in which the real world has come to resemble the dark world of comic books. —LA Times